If we'd had any sense, we might have watched them on a fine day go and sit on the compost heap and sun themselves, and then have concluded that if they liked light and heat outside, they'd like it inside.

At the College we met Dr Ismail who took us through the college campus down to the fields where the vermi-pits were and we saw the biogas plant, the garbage collection pits, the culture crates and the organic compost now ready for use.

The main vermi-beds, compost pits and so on were on the ground floor but some of the vermi-beds which were in crates were stacked in the narrow corridor outside the study hall, where we also gathered to eat our lunch in the afternoons.

Vermiculture because they could practise this at home to process the garbage into compost and snakes because people have so many fears about them.

The way in which that sticky compost of boiled maize went down was absolutely amazing.

Straw is then placed over this dung, and then earth or soil collected from gullies and ravines, and this arranged stratum super stratum, till it forms an immense compact cake of rich compost; and when it has filled one of the yards and has completed a thickness of five feet, he sells it to the farmers, who send their carts to carry it off.

The compost therefore is prepared, and ready to be carried off in one yard, while the others are filling.

He collects bones too, and offal to add to the compost.

Fac-simile of a Woodcut in the "Grand Kalendrier ou Compost des Bergers:" small folio, Troyes, Nicholas le Rouge, 1529.]

As an improvement of method the seed was now being given in many cases a preliminary rotting in compost heaps, with a consequent speeding of its availability as plant food; and cotton seed rose to such esteem as a fertilizer for general purposes that many planters rated it to be worth from sixteen to twenty-five cents a bushel of twenty-five pounds.

Several of the fish caught turned out to be delicious, while others were of a quality that caused them to be thrown into the compost heap.

At this consultation it was decided that it would be better to finish the picking up of a considerable plot of ground, one of at least half an acre in extent, that was already commenced, within the crater, scatter their compost over it, and spade all up together, and plant, mixing in as much of the sea-weed as they could conveniently spade under.

It may be as well said here, that, at odd times, he threw these little deposits into large heaps, and subsequently wheeled them into the crater, where they were mixed with the principal pile of compost that had now been, for months, collecting there.

Mark was quite a month in getting these materials into his compost heap, which he intended should lie in a pile during the winter, in order that it might be ready for spading in the spring.

It wanted a little in consistency, perhaps; but the compost heap was very large, containing enough of all the materials just mentioned to give the garden another good dressing.

Taking care to preserve the breed, therefore, he killed off the pigs, of which he had fresh litters, from time to time; and when he found the old hogs getting to be troublesome, as swine will become with years, he just shot them, and buried their bodies in his compost heap, or in his garden, where one common-sized hog would render highly fertile several yards square of earth, or ashes.

His dream confirm'd his thought: with troubled look Straight to the western gate his way he took: There, as his dream foretold, a cart he found, That carried compost forth to dung the ground.

Alfred Putz (A); 20Dec60; R268067. Making a compost heap.

Its margin is washed by more than ten miles of tide water; from the beds of which and the innumerable coves, inlets, and small marshes, with which it abounds, an inexhaustible fund of mud may be drawn as a manure, either to be used separately or in a compost....

Certainly it is not your fault that this compost makes yet another jumble of his two desires, and persuades himself that the two are somehow allied.

He goes on (II, 14) to lay down rules about the compost heap which should be written in letters of gold in every farm house.

But it is wise to bury a piece of oak wood in the midst of this compost, for that will prevent venomous snakes from lurking in it.

What sour land the Romans had they corrected with humus making barnyard manure, or the rich compost which Cato and Columella recommend.

In a recipe for a rich compost suitable for small garden plants, we are advised (I, 2, I, p. 95), without a quiver, to mix in bloodthat of the camel or the sheep if necessarybut human blood is to be preferred!]

Little peculiarity of after treatment is requisite, except perhaps that the bulbs which are to flower in the season should have a rather larger proportion of leaf mould in the compost, and that if handsome flowers are required, it will be well to examine the bulb every week at least by gently taking the mould from around them, and removing all off-sets that appear on the old bulb.